Hard as I try, I can’t seem to get a lot of things right but I do make the world’s best pumpkin chocolate chip cake. It’s not complicated - real pumpkin, Bisquick, butter, eggs, brown sugar, oil, a quarter inch of water on the poured batter, and, what can I say, your life will change for the better. If I leave out the pumpkin or the butter or the oil, it’s just not going to be the world’s best.

I got a lot of passionate letters after my last editorial about gun/murder control and mental illness, including some very fanatical NRA blather who want to be my friend. No thanks. Everybody wants to advocate their position and I think we have to stand up but clearly. First of all, I applaud the NRA’s safety training programs which, I am sure, have saved many a hunters’ lives. I disdain the NRA’s commercial advocacy of gun consumerism, at the expense of safety. Perhaps then, the solution would be to have two associations: The NGSA (The National Gun Safety Association) and the Commercial Rifle Assosiation Proponents (opps, can’t use that accronym).

So all commercialism aside, we must have a three-fold regulation policy for murder reduction. The first is to do a much better job of recognizing the mentally ill or the just plain “angry at their neighbor. The second is to stop training our children to kill through video games. Adam Lanza learned how to kill efficiently largely through video games. Thirdly, we need to limit gun availability. The idea that we need more guns and more armed guards is akin to saying that diabetics must have more sugar available.

We need to evolve beyond the killing madness and we can. But just like with my pumpkin cake, we need all the ingredients to address all the issue comprehensively. If the Newtown killings weren’t a message from God, then I don’t know what would be.

Some people want to add nuts to my cake recipe but let’s get real, we already have plenty of those.